Is $1.00 per 1,000 impressions on a banner exchange worth it?

[fairhousing]

Hello:

The banner exchange I'm using allows members to buy 1000 extra impression for $1.00 compared to non-members at $2. Is that a reasonable rate to say advertise my site and/or affiliate programs I use to make money? Are banner exchanges worth advertising on? Any suggestions or war stories would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in Advance!

[NanoTech]

Hi,

I would never buy impressions from a banner-exchange. There are plenty of free ones out there, without you needing to purchase any rotation space.

Dave

[Questy]

While $1.00 per 1,000 impressions sounds cheap, does the advertiser have rules to where the ad must be placed? Or how many other ads can be on the same page as yours?

On some "professional" advertising sites, the best banners are getting about 4 hits per 1000, yet my own experinces are not as well.

Here again I see analogies from other forms of advertising. Would you pay a $1 for a radio commercial? What if no one was listening to the station? What if the station caters to older folks, and you're selling something geared toward teenagers?

Is it worth $.25 a click to you? And oh Geez, I thought I'd never see a need for a goto.com, but here is an example, you can buy guaranteed clicks for much less, (say perhaps $.02 per click.

Somewhere the market for paid impressions will slowly dry up. That's why affiliate programs are so hot, the sponsor only pays for results.

Here's some more food for thought on advertising:
www.very-cool-stuff.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000010.html

[This message has been edited by Questy (edited 04-06-99).]

[Edwin]

Two separate issues:-

A) Advertising your site... at $1 CPM it MIGHT be worth it, depending on what your site offers and how many pages the average visitor views, etc.

B) Buying banner space to advertise an affiliate program: this is a very weird suggestion as you are spending good money to chase funny money! By that I mean that for instance if you buy $1,000 worth of ads (1,000,000 impressions) there is no guarantee of making sales that will bring in $1,000 (for instance, that would be sales of $20,000 worth of books on Amazon.com, a pipedream). I would say that in 99.9% of the time it doesn't pay to buy banner space "on behalf" of a site whose affiliate program you belong to!

Mind you, if you could get a 3%-4% click-through on your banner (like advertisers were getting on my site when I still HAD advertisers) then for your $1 you are getting 30+ visitors and it might be a very good move.

There is one more issue: in the original post, it was clear that this bargain rate was only open to banner exchange members. Now that means that you would have to clutter your site with all kinds of junk banners to qualify for the cheap rate!

Edwin

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